In the Spotlight: MetaSwitch’s John Lazar

Every once in a while, you have to take a breath and count your blessings. MetaSwitch CEO John Lazar tallied his up recently and didn’t stop until he reached 500. That’s the number of softswitch and gateway deployments his company has. Here’s what he had to say about this first of what he expects to be many milestones.

On the significance of joining the 500 Club: It’s an interesting maturing of the business that we are pleased with. One obvious manifestation of this is that we are getting a lot of repeat business now. Our customers’ growth is helping us. We have a success-based model with our customers and as they grow we grow. We now have the capacity to reach 10 million subscribers.

On where his company’s growth is coming from: We are continuing to push both upwards and outwards. Our customer base is evolving nicely. We have had some interesting Tier 1 success over the last year, particularly with Bell Aliant. And BT. We also had a nice win in the cable space, so we are interested in seeing where that goes. And we had growth in new geographies, such as Central and Latin America. We have built a team to go after that market. And in Asia-Pac, we are being more systematic in taking on the opportunities there.

On staying true to its IOC roots: Our hotbed is still in the combination of independent companies and CLECs, so we have been very careful with our growth. But I now feel confident that we have the capacity to take on new opportunities. I think you have to make sure you have the organizational capacity before taking it on. We are always going to be carefully measured in our growth; it’s part of the reason we are still here. Besides, we are lucky with our parent company, Data Connection. They have a standing history of supporting big customers, and that expertise is very useful to us.

On what’s driving sales: People are feeling more comfortable with next-generation technology. Also service providers are realizing that over time as their legacy networks age, they really do have to begin moving. And once they start moving to converge the IP and TDM networks, they inevitably begin to think about new service on top of that. They need to think creatively about the range of services they can provide in response to increased competition and if they stick with an existing legacy network, they will be in a weak position to respond. We can’t predict what services people will use and certainly can’t predict what they will pay for. And that’s the real promise of next-gen technology. It’s more flexible so businesses can respond to new opportunities.

On how to sustain momentum: The challenge is all about scaling now. Every organization study I’ve read says when you get to $50 million in revenue and 150 employees -- and we’ve done both -- you enter a new realm. It’s really about internal organization and processes and operational structure, and I have spent a lot of time trying to build the business well in that way. One of the things we hold very strongly is that it comes down to people, and we make sure we recruit the best people we can. We train them well and organize them in effective ways with minimal barriers to their working efficiently.

On what’s next: We are getting much more involved in providing professional services like network planning, integration, training. We also put a whole new marketing program together, which helps our customers build their products and services. We are much more focused now on helping customers make a success of their business, instead of just thinking about this as a technology relationship.